Stakeholder management is as important as it is challenging: Without the support of the stakeholders, it is virtually impossible to achieve product success. Aligning them, however, can be tricky. In the worst case, you experience endless meetings, conflicting opinions, and bad compromises. But it doesn’t have to be this way. This article offers five practical measures to help you succeed with stakeholder management.
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Focus on the Right Stakeholder
The first step in succeeding with stakeholder management is to engage the right people in the right way. That’s sometimes easier said than done. Especially in bigger companies, a large number of individuals can take an interest in a product. But working with a big stakeholder group can be challenging: Involving everyone can take up a lot of time and make securing buy-in very difficult.[1]
You should therefore focus your stakeholder management effort and identify the key stakeholders. To do this, carry out a stakeholder analysis using a tool like the Power-Interest Grid, shown in Figure 1.[2]
As its name suggests, the grid analyses the stakeholders and divides them into four groups by considering their power and interest: players, subjects, context setters, and crowd.[3]
Once you’ve established the four groups, decide how to engage with them. The stakeholders you should focus on and closely align with are the players—these are your key stakeholders. Earn their trust, communicate with them regularly, and involve them in important product decisions, as I explain in more detail later.
Interacting with the other groups is still important, but should require significantly less effort. My advice is to consult with the context setters, who often are senior stakeholders, like a head of development. Engage the subjects, for example, by sharing the product roadmap and collecting their feedback on new features and releases. Finally, keep the crowd informed, for instance, by sending them quarterly updates.
Build Trustful Connections
Trust is the magic ingredient in stakeholder management: When people trust you, they are more likely to agree with you and follow your lead. To build trust with stakeholders, follow the five recommendations below.[4]
- Show that you have the right product management competence. You should know the market/domain, including user and customer needs, the competitive landscape, and relevant trends. Additionally, you should be able to methodically solve product management challenges, for example, being able to create an effective product strategy, build an actionable product roadmap, and select the right KPIs.
- Empathise with the stakeholders and take an interest in their needs and motivations. Make time to get to know the individuals, for example, by having coffee together; practise active listening and listen with the intention to understand.
- Act with integrity. Be truthful and do what you say. Share successes and issues honestly. Don’t sugarcoat problems and don’t overstate achievements.
- Be accountable and take ownership of your actions and their results. Don’t promise something that you cannot keep, and deliver on your promises. Be willing to apologise for a mistake.
- Encourage continuity. An individual should be a key stakeholder for an extended period of time—at least for 12 months, as a rule of thumb. This helps build trust; it reduces handoffs, delays, and loss of knowledge; and it increases productivity.
Bear in mind that building trust takes time, consistency, and patience. Don’t think of it as a quick, one-off effort. Make it a part of your stakeholder management work, and continuously look for opportunities to foster trust and strengthen relationships.
Set the Right Outcomes
To deliver a successful product, you must align the stakeholders and move forward together. Establishing the right outcomes will help you with this. While every product, team, and organisation are unique, I find that product teams generally benefit from using the four types of outcomes captured in Figure 2.[5]
The first outcome in Figure 2 is the vision. It describes the ultimate purpose for creating the product and the positive change it should bring about. The second element is the user, customer, and business goals. They state the needs a product should address, and the business benefits it should offer. I recommend capturing the outcomes in the product strategy using, for example, my Product Vision Board.[6]
With user, customer, and business goals in place, you can take the next step and determine the right product goals. These are the specific outcomes, or objectives, the product should create, for example, increase conversion or reduce churn. They typically cover a two to three-month time frame and may be shown on an outcome-based roadmap like my GO Product Roadmap.
In many ways, the product goal is the most important outcome to achieve stakeholder alignment. If everyone supports the current goal, deciding whether a feature should be implemented becomes comparatively easy: If it helps you achieve the outcome, accept it. Otherwise, postpone or discard it.
The last goal in Figure 2 is the sprint goal, the outcome you want to achieve in the next few weeks. Meeting a sprint goal should result in getting closer to achieving the next product goal, which, in turn, should help you get closer to addressing the user/customer and business goals. The outcomes in Figure 2 are therefore interconnected, as I describe in more detail in the article Leading Through Shared Goals.
No matter if you apply the goal-setting framework in Figure 2 or not, make sure that you align your stakeholders using outcome-based goals and that the outcomes you set are systematically connected. Finally, don’t forget to regularly review the goals to understand how much progress you have made and if an outcome should be adapted, as I discuss in the next section.
Engage the Stakeholders Early and Frequently
Remember the last time someone presented an important decision and asked you to support it? How did it feel? Let me guess—it wasn’t great. That’s no surprise: People often find it hard to fully endorse a key decision if they were not involved in the decision-making process.
To maximise the chances that the key stakeholders buy into the outcomes discussed above, you should involve them early and regularly—ideally right from the start of the product life cycle.[7] This offers the following three benefits:
- Shared ownership and stronger buy-in: Being able to influence and shape a decision leads to a sense of shared ownership. This boosts stakeholder buy-in, motivation, and accountability.
- Better decisions: Involving people in the decision-making process leverages their expertise and creativity, and it mitigates cognitive biases like the tendency to prefer data that confirms our preconceived ideas. This can lead to better decisions and better outcomes.
- Increased transparency and trust: Being involved in making important decisions helps the stakeholders better understand why and how a decision is made, including its trade-offs. This creates transparency and builds trust.
A great way to put this into practice is to schedule regular collaborative workshops:
- Quarterly strategy meetings: Invite the stakeholders to quarterly strategy meetings to review the outcomes you set together with the product strategy and product roadmap, and adapt them to proactively guide product discovery and delivery. Two hours are usually enough for the meeting.
- Monthly sprint review attendance: Ask the key stakeholders to attend the sprint review meeting at least once per month to understand the progress of the current development effort and give them the opportunity for people to share feedback and ideas. The time required is typically one to two hours, depending on the sprint length.
Schedule additional meetings, as needed, including one-on-ones and workshops with selected stakeholders, for example, to discuss changes to the marketing strategy with the marketer and get an update from the sales rep.
To secure agreement, use the collaborative decision-making techniques I describe in the article Making Effective Product Decisions and my book How to Lead in Product Management. Pay particular attention to selecting the right decision rule, for example, unanimity to choose new user/customer goals and consent to set the right product goals/OKRs.
You can take this approach to the next level and invite the key stakeholders to join the product team, as Figure 3 illustrates.
The product team in Figure 3 consists not only of a product manager, a UX designer, a tech lead, and a tester. It also has the key stakeholders as members, as well as a team coach. This shifts the focus from stakeholder management to stakeholder collaboration, as I explain in more detail in the article Should Stakeholders be on the Product Team?
Navigate Conflict Skilfully
It can be hard to deal with unrealistic stakeholder expectations and say no to ideas and feature requests. You might not want to disappoint people or worry about having to deal with disagreements and conflicts. But successful products are not built on weak compromises. As Steve Jobs once said, “Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things.”
The truth is that successful innovation requires diverging ideas and passionate arguments. It requires the willingness to experience and resolve conflict. How can you create something new and amazing when everybody quickly agrees? In the worst case, you practise design by committee, broker a weak compromise, and agree on the smallest common denominator. But that’s hardly a recipe for product success. It’s therefore important to address disagreements effectively—instead of brushing them under the metaphorical carpet.
A framework that helps you resolve conflicts skilfully is Non-Violent Communication (NVC), shown in Figure 4.
The framework recommends that the stakeholder and you share your observations, feelings, and needs before making mutual requests to resolve the issue and prevent it from occurring again. It encourages a dialogue between the conflict parties and wants people to help understand their perspectives and motivations. Applied correctly, it not only resolves the conflict. It also rebuilds and strengthens the relationship, as I explain in more detail in the article How to Leverage Conflict in Product Management.
Summary
While stakeholder management is hardly ever easy, it’s part and parcel of product management. What’s more, it’s an opportunity to develop your leadership and people skills. This will not only help you create successful products but also progress your career. To say it with Stephen M.R. Covey’s words: The ability to establish, grow, extend, and restore trust with all stakeholders is a key leadership competency.[8]
Notes
[1] A stakeholder is anyone who has a stake in your product, who is affected by it, or who shows an interest in the offering. While this definition includes users and customers, I use the term in this article to refer to internal business stakeholders, like a marketer, sales rep, and customer support team member.
[2] The power-interest grid was originally proposed by A. L. Medelow in the paper “Environmental Scanning: The Impact of the Stakeholder Concept.” It was later refined by Ackerman and Eden in their book Making Strategy.
[3] I view someone as powerful if their expertise or support is required to progress a product. For a commercial product, this might be a marketeer and sales rep, as their knowledge may be needed to make the right product decisions. Other powerful stakeholders often include senior managers like the head of sales and the head of development.
[4] Note that not all stakeholders don’t have to trust you to the same extent. The people to focus on are the key stakeholders, the players in Figure 1. You should aim to establish close, trustful connections with them. Next are the context setters, then the subjects, and finally the crowd, in order of priority.
[5] Note that I use the terms outcome and goal interchangeably in this section, as the goals in Figure 2 are all outcome-based: They should all describe the positive impact you want to achieve, from the vision to the sprint goal.
[6] The vision is stated in the top section of the canvas. The user and customer goals are captured in the Needs section, and the business goals are captured in the Business Goals section, as I explain in the video Product Vision Board Introduction.
[7] Note that stakeholder involvement at the early lifecycle stages is especially important, as a large number of high-impact decisions are made during this period.
[8] See Stephen M.R. Covey, The Speed of Trust, Free Press, 2008.
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